Crime Punishment in America

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The United States is addicted to imprisoning its citizens. According to the most recent data supplied by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 2.2 million individuals are currently incarcerated in this country—and another 4.5 million live under a form of community supervision, such as probation or parole. The total number of Americans filtering through the criminal justice system is almost twice the size of the population of Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest city. Mass incarceration remains one of the most urgent social problems of our time. As such, the failings of the U.S. criminal justice system continue to provide fertile ground for both political discussion and narrative imagination. From gangster films and detective novels to police procedurals, courtroom dramas, and true-crime podcasts, Americans like to tell themselves stories about crime and punishment. In doing so, we don’t simply come to terms with the forces that have made us the “jailingest country on earth.” We help to determine who is and isn’t worthy of democratic citizenship, and we engage in long-standing social debates about law and lawlessness, innocence and guilt, criminality and victimhood, retribution and rehabilitation, protection and control, race, class, and citizenship. This seminar takes the history, politics, and representation of criminal justice in the United States as its point of departure, exploring the myths and realities of American crime and American punishment across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alongside relevant readings from the cultural canon of criminal justice, we will engage with recent scholarly studies on the makings of our carceral society.